Not that long ago I ran into some political drivel from the USA about USAID and how one of the many things that these moneys were being directed towards was a certain amount of millions of dollars to get the Vietnamese to stop burning trash. I don't remember the source so don't ask but I am here to tell USAID and anyone else that cares that if this project on the part of the Americans was ever actually meant to be successful that has not been the case and the money was wasted as the burning of trash is not only not illegal here, it seems to be the norm.
Due to having nothing else to do and since there was a break in the rainy rainy days we have been having lately, I decided to go out for a ride and simply explore. I went to some areas of the city that not many people live in just to get away from the noise for a while. The idea was to find a cafe somewhere that it is quiet but instead I stumbled upon garbage heap after garbage heap and then i notices smoke in the distance.
This was otherwise quite a nice looking area and the tarmac seemed to be quite new. Who knows what they have planned for this area in the future but for now it appears to be just a dumping ground for garbage, unfortunately.
There is all manner of garbage here and a lot of it looks like industrial waste that won't actually burn like leftover stones and one of the photos shows some sort of massive drain-pipe portion that makes me wonder why would they just leave that there?
I don't want to appear ethnocentric or like I am coming down on the Vietnamese for their practices but honestly, is there not a better way to do this? To me it was just so disappointing because this part of the city was actually really nice looking otherwise but the two women that I encountered at the end weren't just hanging about, they were dressed similarly and it looks like this is actually their job.
I'm not exactly Greta Thunberg when it comes to environmentalism but I seem to remember someone at some point in my life stating that the burning of certain things like plastics and Styrofoam was particularly bad for the environment. I suppose it is better to burn it than to throw it into the ocean but unfortunately the second thing happens quite a lot in this country as well.
Out of sight, out of mind I guess but it is my understanding that Vietnam has some of the worst environmental track records in the world and try as they may to hide it by doing the burning out out-of-the-way locations such as this one, I'm here to tell you that the practice is very much alive and well. It's such a shame.
I was reading the other day and article about how Singapore uses trash burning facilities that filters the smoke and the end result is only a completely inert ash that is actually usable and not damaging to anything. If we want to give money to Vietnam to improve their environmental practices, why not put it towards something like that?